Our good friend Greg Sharko at the ATP World Tour Communications department does point out that if Federer chooses to skip a Masters 1000-level event he will receive a 0-pointer for not playing the tournament, but he will not be issued any penalty.

Truth be told, this little gem of an exception will unlikely make much difference to Federer, who has ignored the rule that calls for top players to support all nine of the Masters 1000 level tournaments when it suited him, and just shrugged off the financial penalties and 0-pointers.

A year ago they gave us two stories, they said they’d sell 49 percent to us and we said Larry Ellison is not going to be a minority partner, and then they told us that they had someone else who was interested and would conform to the 51 to 49 percent, and they never even came back to us. They never said, ‘Guys we have a buyer from Bogota do you want to preempt it?’